The krays

We know the facts about Brian Epstein’s death. The Beatles’ manager died in bed at his Belgravia home on 27 August 1967, six years after he struck gold in a Liverpool cellar, a month before his contract to manage the Beatles was due to end and four weeks after homosexual acts between men were partly decriminalised. At the time of his death, the 32-year-old Epstein was addicted, adrift and depressed – not least as a result of a long effort to hide his sexuality and the low-level anti-Semitism he encountered everywhere. One moment he was manically active, the next he was in despair, according to those around him. He had overdosed in the past and had been treated at a psychiatric hospital. On the day he died, his blood contained alcohol, antidepressants and barbiturates.

What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. They are talking about a brief golden age, a perfect moment in their lives: Blahnik: So sometimes I just have to sit down and say: ‘God, did all this happen?’ All the excitement, it doesn’t exist any more, maybe because I’m old.Bailey: It’s not because you’re old. It doesn’t exist. This is the autobiography of David Bailey, as told to James Fox (‘my collaborator’). It starts with Bailey as a child in the East End, and ends with Bailey returning there as an old man.

Just after John Pearson finished writing The Profession of Violence, his celebrated biography of the Krays, both his and his agent’s officeswere broken into. Letters from Lord Boothby to Ronnie Kray had disappeared, as had a copy of the book’s manuscript. Pearson then received a telephone call from the high-powered lawyer Lord Goodman, who warned him that the book libelled Boothby. A subsequent phone call from Goodman to Pearson’s publisher led to the book’s contract being cancelled.